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Western Martial Arts

The second issue of Cimarronin is out this week. You can find it at Comixology or if you bought it direct from Jet City Comics via Amazon.com, you should have it on your Kindle already (via the magic of serialization).

We—meaning your earnest team of myself, Ellis Amdur, Charles C. Mann, Neal Stephenson, and Robert Sammelin—take you, our devoted reader, to New Spain, where we discover a bit more of the big picture that Luis is hinting at. His family—scions of Spanish nobility—have a silver mine in New Spain, and it’s constantly being robbed by local bandits. Part of Luis’s job in Manila was to have been hiring masterless samurai (ronin) to help guard the silver caravans. Luis comes back with one: Kitazume. Which doesn’t go over so well with Luis’s brother. But that may be all part of Luis’s clever plan . . .

And then El Gato shows up, and things get complicated . . .

[The whole samurai guarding the silver caravans? That’s all true. It’s the genesis of the project, and you can read about it in Charles C. Mann’s awesome book, 1493.]

Pipedream Comics reviewed the first issue. Their summary: “While not groundbreaking enough to receive full marks, Cimarronin is still a truly outstanding book made from a great script, fantastic art and inhabited by genuinely interesting, three dimensional characters. While it has some flaws in places, these can’t prevent this first installment from being an epic tale which deserves to be read.”

Escapist Magazine says: “It’s not the most outstanding debut issue (a little more background would go a long way), nor it the most deep story, but it is solid fun.”

Both of which I find to be interesting commentary from the comic book world. Novel readers are a little more lenient, it would seem, in waiting for backstory to be presented. We’ll have to see how folks feel as we move along because we dole out the backstory quite regularly as we progress.